AMD's Open-Source Radeon Driver After Four Years
Linked by David Adams on Thu 18th Aug 2011 19:09 UTC, submitted by Michael
Graphics, User Interfaces While the BFS scheduler is getting ready to celebrate its second birthday, in just three weeks AMD's open-source Radeon graphics driver strategy for Linux will be turning four years old . . . which has ended up being a game-changer in the Linux world. AMD continues to support open-source hardware enablement on their latest graphics processors and recently even hired more developers to work on the code and documentation. How far have they come though in four years?
E-mail Print r 1   28 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/jcr
Thread beginning with comment 485942
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

"For newer Radeon GPUs, we are also still waiting for the stack to even reach 80% the speed of Catalyst. Besides the performance, the open-source driver stack still needs to catch up with supporting modern revisions of OpenGL (i.e. OpenGL 3.0+), better power management, and other features being sought after by desktop Linux users." The whole 6 pages condensed to a couple sentences.


The features supported by the open source radeon drivers (for AMD/ATI GPUs) is tracked here:

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Apart from memory re-clocking for R300 or older GPUs, all of the "Power Saving" functionality is already in place.

The work to go towards OpenGL 3.0, 3.1 and beyond is listed here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTc3OA

After stagnating for a long time, this work is finally nearing completion and the majority of items in the OpenGL 3.x work are done. Thankfully it is going ahead at an accelerating rate now.

Performance is also improving all the time.

Just for a bit of perspective here ...

Edited 2011-08-19 03:30 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2